Flotsam

Soundtrack for this story.

It can’t be avoided; pervasive, perpetual – the smell. Get the best air filters ever manufactured,run the air cyclers constantly, and it will still be hanging in the air. Sweat, gear oil, old food, and even a slight tinge of urine. Just enough to be detectable, just enough to disgust.

There was a time when I didn’t care about the smell. I remember when I could merely look out the porthole and be entranced by the expanse of stars. Now, even when I try to recall those initial moments of joy, I only seem to get an intense feeling self-loathing. I move through the low gravity with ease and grace, but it is now just the same as walking, the ecstasy that I felt from the first encounter with floating has long since dissipated.

I fluctuate between rushing through my daily routine so that the same boring tasks are done sooner and lazily dragging out everything so that the time when I have nothing to do is much shorter. Wake up. Check systems. Change filters. Eat. Update log. Sleep. Repeat again and again, ad nauseam.

Before I decided to go, the number of days didn’t seem like such a large amount. Confinement to a pressurized cage of carbon fibre, aluminum, and steel changes one’s perspective. I can no longer even contrive the grand naivete that I felt during my training, the endless claims of jealousy and pride that I heard, if only those people knew the reality, the grand and resplendent monotony of space travel.

There is no adventure involved, but there is maintenance. Every system requires some kind of upkeep: fuels need to be remixed, coolant levels adjusted, damage repaired, and, of course, there is always cleaning. What the air scrubbers don’t get needs to be cleaned by hand. Smears, smudges, stray hairs, tiny particles that seem to get everywhere.

Today is a special treat – the waste management system requires cleaning. No matter where humanity may go or what heights of technology it may reach, one thing is definitely constant, it will always need some kind of toilet.

As I am elbow-deep in a nest of tubes trying to screw a new filter in palce an alarm blares from the cockpit. I am uncertain if I should be happy that I get a brief reprieve from the onerous task or if I should be upset for being interrupted. Even the alarms are routine: the automated sensors have found some small piece of rock or ice that will undoubtedly strike the surface of the vessel and subsequently require repair.

The screen flashes orange and yellow, “OBJECT DETECTED” in large block letters. I tap, then tap again on what is becoming a dead spot on the touch screen and the view cycles to an exterior camera clouded with dust. I stare at the screen, then after a few seconds take several deep breaths. I forget that my hands might be smeared with some unpleasant substances as I rub my eyes and pinch my nose before looking at the screen again.

I push away from the monitoring station and effortlessly glide towards the controls. There is a specific protocol to slow or stop progress and a lot of menus and notices to confirm, and I tap the screen urgently as they pop up. “Yes, I accept.” I say aloud as I click away the final notice. The droning sound of the engines change and lessen as the vessel accepts my commands. I push away from the the control panel.

I am close enough to the porthole that my breath fogs the glass. I move the small thumbpad to shine the spotlight. I go past it at first, then I exhale and direct the light directly onto it. Space travel is rare, people are jealous of me that I am one of the few people that has embarked on a great journey through the stars, so perhaps this is the reason that I feel so strange to stare out of the only spacecraft that humanity has ever sent this far, at the wreckage of what is assuredly another spacecraft…

I guess I have been thinking about Starfield recently…